Good Reading for a Rainy Day
Light Prose
- - P. G. Wodehouse
- - Bill Bryson
- - Dave Barry
- - Thorne Smith
- - Will Cuppy
- - Ambrose Bierce
- - H. F. Ellis
- - Robert Benchley
- - Tom Stoppard
- - Harry Leon Wilson
- - John Collier
- - Saki
- - R. S. Surtees
- - Booth Tarkington
- - Evelyn Waugh
- - Thomas Love Peacock
- - Ring Lardner
- - H. Allen Smith
- - Eric Knight
- - W. W. Jacobs
Prose Non-Fiction
- - Adams, The Education of Henry Adams
- - Casanova Memoirs (Trask translation – thought to be mostly veridical)
- - Clark, Being There
- - Dana, Two Years Before the Mast
- - Days of H. L. Mencken
- - Dewey, Quest for Certainty
- - Fox, The Long March
- - Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
- - Hudson, Far Away and Long Ago (and Idle Days in Patagonia)
- - Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature
- - Hume Essays: Moral, Political, and Literary
- - Mencken, Chrestomathy
- - Orwell’s Essays (Everyman’s 2002)
- - Ward-Perkins, The Fall of Rome: And the End of Civilization
Prose Fiction
- - Dickens, Pickwick Papers
- - Don Quixote (Putnam translation)
- - Faulkner Collected Stories
- - Faulkner Three Famous Short Novels
- - Folio Maugham Collected Short Stories (four vols.)
- - Lewis, Narnia
- - Melville Typee and Omoo
- - Reardon, Collected Ancient Greek Novels
- - Sassoon, Memoirs of George Sherston (fictionalized autobiography)
- - Twain, Tom Sawyer Tetralogy
Verse
- - Beowulf (Heaney translation)
- - Chapman’s Homer (two volumes PUP edition 1967)
- - Eliot’s Choice of Kipling’s Verse
- - Fagles’ Aeneid
- - Folio Auden Collected Shorter Poems
- - Folio Paradise Lost
- - Folio Tennyson
- - Folio Wordsworth
- - Kehew, Lark in the Morning
- - Larkin, The Oxford Book of Twentieth Century English Verse
- - Oxford Book of English Verse (both Christopher Ricks and Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch)
- - Shakespeare: Sonnets (Vendler), Romeo & Juliet, Twelfth Night, Much Ado About Nothing (Yale UP annotated Shakespeare)
- - The Green Knight (Armitage translation)
- - Thwaite’s 2003 Philip Larkin Poems
Hot off the Press
- - Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything
- - Ericson and Mahoney The Solzhenitsyn Reader
- - Kennedy, The Highly Civilized Man: Richard Burton and the Victorian World
- - Nuttall, Shakespeare the Thinker
- - Ravitch, The English Reader
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